A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.

The human comedy is always tragic, but since its ingredients are always the same - dupe, fox, straight, like burlesque skits - the repetition through the ages is comedy.

Hold fast to whatever fragments of love that exist, for sometimes a mosaic is more beautiful than an unbroken pattern.

Satire is people as they are; romanticism, people as they would like to be; realism, people as they seem with their insides left out.

All Americans come from Ohio originally, if only briefly.

A capacity for going overboard is a requisite for a full-grown mind.

I cannot exist without the oxygen of laughter.

I realize more and more how instinctively pessimistic I am of all human kindness -- since I am always so bowled over by it -- and am never surprised by injustice, malice or personal attack.

Yet better for one of my nature to have it that way than to have life a peaceful, placid flow of quiet contentment. I must have days of rushing excitement.

Joe and Jojo and I had lovely day together. I love Joe so much - more and more.

A writer's business is minding other people's business ... all the vices of the village gossip are the virtues of the writer.

We suffer from the malady of words, and have no trust in any feeling that is not stamped with its special word.

To turn down knowledge is to resign to ignorance.

[A] book is not merely a book, it is the sun as well.

Puzzle pieces don't always connect do they?

[W]here other powers of entertainment are wanting, the true philosopher will derive benefit from such as are given.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

First we have to believe, and then we believe.

The man who renounces himself, comes to himself.

Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés.